Yesterday we carried a piece by Robert Tracinski advocating a military strike against Iran:

But these leaders have so far avoided advocating the use of military force against Iran. No one is willing to follow the implications of the big picture to the only rational conclusion: we are already in a regional war with Iran, and we need to start fighting it as a regional war. And the most effective place to fight that war is at its center, by targeting the Islamist regime in Tehran.

Tracinski goes on to cite an article by Michael Rubin that appeared in the NY Daily News on Wednesday:

Instead, our current policy is a bizarre, irrational holdover from the Cold War. In a New York Daily News op-ed, for example, Michael Rubin assures us that confronting Iran "need not mean military action." Instead, he advocates a policy of stronger words, from beefed up Radio Free Europe-style broadcasts to rhetoric such as the "Axis of Evil." His most telling recommendation is this one: "Just as Ronald Reagan championed striking shipyard workers in Poland in 1981, so too should Bush support independent Iranian trade unions."

Rubin is advocating a strategy I have called Cold War II: fighting Iran the way we fought the Soviet Union, through indirect battles against insurgent proxies (the real parallel between Iraq and Vietnam) and through moral support for Iranian dissidents. But this is brinksmanship without a brink. The reason we had to fight the Soviets indirectly was because they had thousands of nuclear weapons aimed at us. There is no reason to fear such an escalation in a battle against Iran. In fact, the gruesome irony of today is that Iran may soon be able to threaten us with nuclear weapons--but only if we continue to act as if they already possessed a nuclear deterrent.

Tracinski's column set off an interesting discussion over at The Corner, first with Michael Ledeen saying that Tracinski "gets it," followed by Rich Lowry questioning whether Ledeen's comment is implicit support of a military effort to depose the Iranian regime. Ledeen replies here. Lowry again here. Finally, Michael Rubin chimes in here.

All in all a very interesting discussion - to which I'll add my voice (for what it's worth) a bit later.